Spaceflight is Dangerous. Pass the chips.

Snow day number three. I figured my two loyal readers deserved a real blog post, so here's one on safety in spaceflight.

Spaceflight is an inherently dangerous activity. Everything about it has the potential to be fatal, and spectacularly so. First, our intrepid explorer is strapped to an explosive stack the size of a medium city. Then, he's shot into a cold, airless environment that is so full of radiation that sunburn times are measured in seconds. Finally, there's a death-defying plunge toward the ground at twenty-five times the speed of sound, all the while encased in air so hot it's no longer air. While in space, there's no appreciable gravity. Down and up are irrelevant, eating and drinking is a chore, and using the facilities requires advanced gymnastics training.

And yet, still we go. Whether it's for the money, the fame, the science, or for Hillary's reason (because it's there), the will always be those who make the venture regardless of the risk. This is the quality that makes exploration possible and also what makes the rewards of that exploration tangible. Those who forge ahead in the face of tremendous odds reap the rewards of their gambles.

Of course, this means that people will get hurt, and that some people will die. Given all of the potential dangers involved with sending people up a couple of hundred miles above the earth, it is inevitable that accidents will happen. Nothing can work correctly every single time. The nature of the universe and the existence of entropy guarantees that things will break. Human weakness makes mental mistakes a certainty. Someone will forget to turn on the widget, or turn off the widget, or turn the widget at the wrong time, or whatever. It is guaranteed.

That said, someday the deaths associated with spaceflight will be just like the deaths associated with air travel. The cameras will show up, and the reporters will report, and the families will grieve, and that will be it. When an airliner crashes, we reflect on how it could have been us, and how sad those affected must be. Currently, when a spaceship crashes, it's a national tragedy. That's okay now, but maybe not in twenty years.

This article from NPR makes the point that the transition of NASA to more difficult tasks leaves private companies in the space taxi business. Private enterprise faced this same situation four decades ago with the rise of Apollo. When we as a nation set our sights on the moon, air disasters became less disasters and more normal life. As we looked toward the moon, the space closer to home became more familiar, smaller, less mysterious.

An interesting thing to consider is that thousands of people die in car crashes every day, yet we pay little attention to them. Air travel is far safer than car travel, and airplane crashes are becoming far less of the spectacle that they used to be. Someday, spaceflight will go the way of the car - problems will be so marginalized that they may not even appear on our radar screens.

And this is the point. The national psyche (nay, even the world's psyche) can only pay so much attention to events. If the world shut down every time there were an airliner crash, we would never get anything done. More people in space means more space disasters. More spaceship crashes will take up more of the collective psyche until the load becomes too great. It is then that these events will become accepted as the price of doing business in space.

n a perverse way, we'll only become good in space when we can care less about it. Once we can mourn astronauts in the same way that we mourn air passengers, we will be well on our way to space fluency. It's a shame that it'll take many deaths to get there.

On deck for tomorrow: mindless link propagation, and happy ones at that.

Cheers,

-- Zach

NASA's Environmentally Responsible Airliner results...

The Seattle pi recently ran an article on the finalists for the NASA Environmentally Responsible Airliner Concept competition. Included are artist's renderings and the companies that produced the designs. I remember having seen a RFP for this last year. At the time, I didn't have the spare mental capacity to take on such a challenge. I really wish that I could have  participated in this.

The designs shown on the website are all blended lifting bodies with rear-mounted engines. I like the rear engine layout for airliners, because it reduces noise and vibration levels in the passenger cabin. One drawback to this configuration is the potential for a deep stall. The designs appear to be slippery enough to allow clean air into the intakes, hopefully reducing or eliminating that problem.

While blended lifting bodies offer exceptional payload and relatively short takeoff and landing rolls, I'm really not crazy about them. My first love is the Lockheed Constellation, an achingly beautiful aircraft. Blended lifting bodies look like pregnant guppy-whale-things. They aren't especially pretty, and that may be their undoing in the air passenger industry.

I would posit that airlines acquire aircraft that fit their need, as the budget allows. Generally, airliners are a temperamental bunch, displaying faults and quirks like any human. Air crews develop personal relationships with individual aircraft, and passengers will travel the globe, change flights, and pay extra to fly a specific airframe (witness the popularity of Airliners.net.) It is therefore in the best interest of the industry to push the design and development of pretty aircraft.

These designs aren't pretty.

Beauty issues aside, I have to wonder if current airports will require modification for these new designs. They appear to have very long wingspans. Could the wings fold like those of a carrier-based aircraft? If they fold up, could they also fold down to take even greater advantage of the massive lift generated by their shapes? Is there any potential for trans- or supersonic performance?

Anyway, I leave the article to you, dear reader. Tomorrow, I'll talk about what kinds of wacky projects I might be doing with Team UTD.

Cheers,

-- Zach